The Game Boy games of June 7-15, 1991, were Soccer, Daisenryaku, and Magical Taruruto-kun.
Soccer (TOSE/Tonkin House) (June 7th)
Despite having a name that screams ‘NES port’, this is actually a brand new game that never released for any other system. It allows you to play as one of eight national teams in a bizarre 7-a-side version of the sport in either single game friendlies or a World Cup mode. It has decent but highly repetitive music and the graphics are at best fine. The main problem is that the AI is an absolute moron that just spams slide tackles when it’s nowhere near the ball, so you’re reliably able to dribble all the way to the box every time any of your players gets the ball. The keeper is also completely useless and can’t stop anything that’s not directly at him, so the only thing that really limits your ability to score at will is that the shooting controls are awful and you will miss badly pretty often.
It scored a 72% from various European critics when it released there as Football International. I assume that’s primarily because of Link Cable multiplayer rather than because anyone enjoyed the single player game. The game is uniquely difficult to search for in Japanese because of its name, but I did find one atwiki post that criticized it for basically all the same reasons I did.
Rating: 1.
Daisenryaku (Hiro) (June 12th)
Part of a very long-running series of Japan-only strategy games that seem to be meant to be like traditional tabletop wargames. As such, it’s completely impenetrable without the manual. All I really managed to figure out is that it’s a real-time game and you earn money to buy units very slowly. There are an unbelievable number of units you can buy if you save up enough money, and moving them seemingly works by picking the name of a city for them to move to on their own. It’s not clear to me how you know which city is which, but I’m sure there was a map in the manual or something. It probably would have been fun in multiplayer if you had a long time to play and both knew the game well.
Famitsu gave it a 24/40, which is about the same score that they gave every version of this on all of the billion platforms it has released for. There’s not much about this specific version anymore since there are dozens of later releases people can play instead.
Rating: 1.
Magical Taruruto–kun (TOSE/Bandai) (June 15th)
Yet another licensed side-scrolling platformer. This one actually has really good music, but the graphics are pitiful and hazards have a tendency to blend in with the noisy backgrounds. It’s somewhat unique for this genre in that you have a high and low attack and enemies can generally only be hit with one of them. Less positively, it’s also unique in having a long intro when you click ‘start game’ that is completely unskippable even if you’re restarting after a game over. Great design.
MobyGames has one 56% review from a German magazine. Every Japanese source on it only says that it had very little content, and a Let’s Play I saw confirms that they’re really not exaggerating. Once you cut out that intro and an even more verbose ending, the total gameplay comes to about 15 minutes over four stages. I ended up deciding to play through it myself to see how true that is, and it took about 45 minutes with save states. This is a really, really simple game that gets by almost entirely through the power of cheap deaths. There are blind jumps into enemies that are all but guaranteed to kill you, attack patterns that are equally lethal on your first encounter, hazards that come in from above without warning, bosses that leave very narrow safe spaces, and all of it in a game where you die in one hit unless you have a power up. The fourth and final level also seems to take much longer than the timer complete, so you have to lose a life to it and restart from a checkpoint unless you’re a real expert at the game. The sole concession the game makes to players is that you’re able to continue from whichever stage you died on, but that’s of limited use with how long and cheap the later levels are.
Weirdly, the stage 2 boss and all of stage 3 are shmups. The bosses of both levels are stupidly easy, with extremely predictable attacks that leave acres of room for you to dodge. Stage 3 itself, however, is full of all the usual nonsense.
Rating: 1.
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